How Many Hours Of Community Service For Medical School

SMS ("Stanford Medical School") Unplugged is a forum for students to chronicle their experiences in medical school. The student-penned entries appear on Telescopic in one case a week; the entire blog series can be found in the SMS Unplugged category.

As the process of applying to medical school, and and so later residency, becomes hyper-competitive, us medical students often experience forced to pursue our passions merely in means that are "loftier-yield." Information technology may seem counterintuitive, but the further nosotros go in our medical grooming, the more inertia we seem to have about giving our time and energy to the every day people in demand. We're so pressed for time from our participation in cut-edge enquiry, highly scalable health-policy piece of work, and exciting start-ups, that we sometimes lose touch with the very people whose need kickoff sparked our commitment to medicine.

We all know that helping people is the right affair to do. I don't need to wax on about how we can exist the people we want to be - how it's a choice. This post is for the moments when we succumb to focusing solely on our resumes and our future applications. This postal service is nearly how using our skills every bit medical students to assist people will really assist u.s. professionally. It's similar when companies align their triple bottom line. We tin can do that, too.

And, so, the reasons:

1. To get individualized mentorship. The gratuitous clinics run by medical students take doctors who walk one or two pre-clinical students through the entire patient run across - from taking the history to doing the physical to presenting the patient. This kind of i-on-one training is very rare.

2. To practise applying clinical skills. As a pre-clinical student in a free clinic, you actually get to exercise a physical exam on existent patients rather than actors pretending to be ill. You get to work through a existent-life clinical reasoning case and generate a differential.

3. To remember why you wanted to go to medical schoolhouse. Medical school tin exist really hard, mostly because it may exist the outset time that you're surrounded by peers who work just as hard as yous do. But go back in touch with the desire to assistance people, which is what brought most of us to medicine in the first place, and you tin replenish your sense of purpose as a medical educatee.

4. To effigy out what yous like clinically. Nigh of us are either honest with ourselves about not knowing what kind of medicine we want to practise or fool ourselves into thinking nosotros know what we want to exercise based on a few shadowing experiences. Either fashion, getting involved and taking an agile role in patient care can assistance y'all decide whether you like cardiology versus neurology, or it can solidify the hunch you already had.

5. To get a leg up when applying to residency. A Harvard surgery resident recently talked most what gave her an advantage when she was applying to residency; her answer was both research and her involvement in gratis clinics. She said that because she worked in a free clinic every Thursday evening doing diabetic foot exams, she was more comfy in a clinical setting, she was more self-guided equally a clinical student, and therefore, she was more competent when she did her sub-I'southward.

Most medical students have a competitive streak. When y'all do something, you want to be skillful at it. So set yourself up to be good at your clinical rotations. Set yourself upward to be taken seriously as a md whether you lot plan to pursue research, policy, or entrepreneurship. Fix yourself upward by volunteering in your community'south free clinics.

Natalia Birgisson is a 2d-year student at Stanford's medical schoolhouse. She is half Icelandic, half Venezuelan and grew up moving internationally earlier coming to Stanford for college. She is interested in neurosurgery, global wellness, and ethics. Natalia loves running and baking; when she'due south lucky the two activities even out.

Photo courtesy of Arbor Free Dispensary